Iran has strongly slammed the move as an overt intervention. "It is an overt intervention in Latin American affairs... that shows they are not familiar with new world relations. The United States still lives in the Cold War era and considers Latin America as its back yard". Strategically dubbed as ‘Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012’, the act calls for the State Department to develop a plan within 180 days to "address Iran's growing hostile...

Yesterday, Jan. 10, was the day when Hugo Chávez was scheduled to be sworn in for the fourth time as Venezuela’s president. Instead, he is lying in a Cuban hospital, suffering serious complications from cancer surgery, and the country’s legislature, dominated by the president’s loyalists, has delayed the ceremony indefinitely. As Venezuelans grapple with the political uncertainty created by Chávez’s precarious health, the prospect of a post-Chávez...

Iran's intelligence service includes 30,000 people who are engaged in covert and clandestine activities that range from spying to stealing technology to terrorist bombings and assassination, according to a Pentagon report. The report concluded that Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, known as MOIS, is "one of the largest and most dynamic intelligence agencies in the Middle East." The ministry actively supports Iran's radical Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)...

Iran has blasted US President Barack Obama for enacting a law aimed at countering Tehran's alleged influence in Latin America, saying it was an overt intervention in the region. "It is an overt intervention in Latin American affairs... that shows they are not familiar with new world relations," Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters on Tuesday. The United States, he said, "still lives in the Cold War era and considers Latin America as its back...

At the request of Iran, the Argentinean and the Iranian Foreign Ministries agreed to hold a dialogue about improving their estranged relationship at the UN General Assembly in September. These two countries have had chilly relations since the Argentinean justice system found Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, to be the main culprits responsible for the deadly attacks on the Jewish Community Headquarters (AMIA) in July 1994 that left 85 people dead and hundreds of others wounded. In 1992 a...

To provide for a comprehensive strategy to counter Iran’s growing hostile presence and activity in the Western Hemisphere, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SEC. 2. Findings. Congress finds the following: (2) Iran is pursuing cooperation with Latin American countries by signing economic and security agreements in order to create a network of diplomatic and economic...

International organizations have a surprising ability to perpetuate themselves, even when they have lost their raison d'être. This phenomenon may explain the sustained survival of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Founded during the Cold War with the alleged objective of establishing a body that positioned itself somewhere between Western countries and the Communist bloc, the NAM survived the East-West confrontation, becoming an umbrella under which emerging powers like India joined forces...

In the past six months, Iran has been making an offensive on all fronts - on the commercial, military, diplomatic and information fronts - with Latin America as the scene, and without minding the cost. Tehran considers the region as one of the points of principal support, in order to overcome their growing international isolation which it is experiencing as a consequence of its nuclear program, and it has decided to act on all levels, multiplying its presence in a region of the world which...

On Wednesday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touched down in Brazil for his first state visit to the South American nation since 2009. The ostensible reason is to attend the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, a high-profile gathering of more than 100 heads of state taking place in Rio de Janeiro. But high on Ahmadinejad’s priority list is an important bit of diplomacy: reinvigorating the once-robust ties between Tehran and Brasilia. For Iran, Brazil is a potential...

One of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere is the city of Warnes, Bolivia, which lies a few kilometers outside the country’s industrial capital of Santa Cruz. There, set back in an open field off a bustling highway, is the new regional defense school of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA-the eight-member economic and geopolitical bloc founded by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro nearly a decade ago. Since its launch last spring,...